Autumn House Press

Winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Cameron Awkward-Rich, and named a "Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026” by Ms. Magazine, Les Portes traces how harm against women and femmes takes root, recurs, and reshapes itself across generations. Unfolding in three movements—Le Début, Le Passé, and Le Présent—all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu, ekphrasis, erasure, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative, collective, and deeply non-carceral. In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.

"With care and attention to its brilliantly complicated and kaleidoscopic characters, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think is a breathtaking collection that is rooted in place, people, and the full scope of who you are and who you get to be. Exploring queerness, gender, poverty, generational trauma, and the ways in which we are formed and form others, the stories in this collection have the scope of sagas and the intimacy of untold secrets." —K-Ming Chang, author of Exhausted Monsters“Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for April 2026,” Autostraddle“Our Most Anticipated Books of 2026,” Chicago Review of Books“Reads for the Rest of Us: The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026,” Ms. Magazine Inventive and emotionally nuanced, Grace Spulak’s debut story collection explores the complexities of gender, queerness, trauma, and resilience through characters who live in the margins and imagine new ways to survive there. Pushing the boundaries of traditional narratives and forms, these stories suggest paths for picking up our pieces—and for transforming and escaping the realities that constrain us. A social worker becomes entangled in the life of a woman she’s meant to investigate, blurring the line between empathy and obsession. A veterinary student communes with a yak that seems to speak to her—if only she could understand its message. And a separating couple embarks on one last errand together to unburden themselves of an unsettling memento. Set in rural New Mexico—a place of isolation, strange beauty, and potential transformation—this collection offers unexpected flashes of grace and hope.

". . . formally various and deliciously propulsive." —Kaveh AkbarA love letter to Miami and a meditation on fatherhood, Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida paints a vivid picture of contemporary South Florida in all its contradictions and beauty. Selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Cunningham’s second collection weaves together ecological and familial landscapes, capturing both the spectacle—burning sugarcane fields, snake farms, chaotic highways—and the daily rituals that bind a family: school drop-offs, sick days, and small kindnesses. Blending formalist and free verse, the book becomes both an inquiry into belonging and a celebration of the essential everyday moments that define a life. At once panoramic and deeply personal, Cunningham writes with a documentarian’s eye and a father’s heart.

“Jasmine Reid writes a shapeful, theoretical work involved in the rigorous attending to emergent selves and the languages made in calling them into being.” —aracelis girmayInterlocutor Goddess explores the creation of a trans language for selfhood within an exilic state of "ecstatic grief."Reid''s experimental work challenges societal norms, particularly the family as a political construct while reflecting on the trans experiences of a queer Black woman. The poems grapple with oppressive systems of separation and colonial legacies, rejecting extractive, empire-driven paradigms, and gender essentialism. Within her collection, Reid envisions alternative, ethical ways of being, rooted in unity and wholeness and finds kinship with the rhythms and lifeways of the natural world—soil, stars, and water. Her poetry employs a trans-lyricism, weaving together dual meanings through homonyms, homophones, and portmanteaus to create a layered, fugitive language that resists rigid classifications. At its core, Interlocutor Goddess is an act of transfiguration, a celebration of girlhood, and a reclamation of wholeness for all who exist beyond imposed boundaries.

Winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, this collection of formalist poetry is part ode, part elegy, and serves as a heartfelt journey in overcoming grief and falling back in love with the world.Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length collection, Rodeo, is personal yet expansive, as Wilkinson carries her readers through sorrow and confusion, reckoning with seismic losses such as a stillborn son and strained relationships, alongside more abstract and existential pains. In the rural and wild western mountains of northern Utah and throughout the American West, Wilkinson finds solace, uncovering startling moments of hope and healing in the aftermath of suffering.Throughout Rodeo, Wilkinson masterfully employs forms like the sonnet, sestina, abecedarian, and epistle to bring wholeness in the midst of fracture. Even while staring clear-eyed at its wounds, the collection resists being swallowed by grief, instead celebrating and meditating on the natural world and its vibrancy, including skunks and owls, horses and cows, wildflowers and grasses. The collection presents a full cycle of mourning and healing, beginning “Sometimes you hold your own hand. / That’s all there is to take” and concludes by reaching out from isolation toward connection with “a hand / for one moment holding / another hand.Drawing from the traditions of poets like Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver and embodying the interconnectedness between land and spirit, individual and community, Rodeo is a powerful rekindling of hope.

New flash fiction collection by Sherrie Flick, coeditor of Flash Fiction America and author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc., a Foreword INDIES bronze prize for best story collection.I Have Not Considered Consequences delves into the complexities of grief, desire, and a peculiar intersection between humans and bears. Flick’s evocative and thought-provoking stories follow characters like Bobby, a local home inspector who zips into a bear suit on his daily rounds, and a Gen-X couple, Matty and Trudy, navigating the ups and downs of their adult lives, from a dead fish named Patti Smith to dashed dreams of indie rock stardom. Women wander through small-town streets as they ponder love, allegiance, and Edith Wharton.In Flick’s world, bears don’t just roam the wild—they play basketball, dance, and even work as midlevel business professionals. Through this memorable cast of characters, Flick reveals intriguing secrets about humanity and yearning with her signature blend of stark honesty and humor.

The Worried Well, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is a tragicomic collection that explores the intersection of anxiety and safety in a chaotic world.Anthony Immergluck balances the thin lines between healing and ailing, between humor and tragedy throughout this exceptional debut poetry collection. Reveling at precipices of imminent disaster while grieving at thresholds of relief, The Worried Well asks, how do we live loving and full lives while being confronted with our mortality? How does language carry us between liminal spaces?The ?worried well? is a term often used pejoratively by medical professionals to describe a group of patients who may be lacking visible symptoms but opt for testing and preventative interventions, who seek treatments for ailments that don?t manifest readily in medical diagnostics. Immergluck unpacks the term by writing in the spaces where worry and wellness meet.Despite the profound subjects explored, the collection carries us with a keen sense of humor, grounds us in the everyday, and rises to meet us with unexpected ruptures or sutures of language on each page. Summoning the restless dybbuk of Jewish mythology as well as David and Goliath, navigating hospital rooms, and surviving economic precarity, Immergluck creates a voice that is utterly new and needed in the literary landscape, a voice that reflects, ?I don?t / know why I told a worry / child not to worry when / surely the trick is to give / the worry a name and then / to call it again and again.?